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This is not with only Yahoo!, this is everywhere on the internet. Anything from CNN to ESPN is filled with ignorant comments. These aren't trolls, these are people truly expressing themselves and taking advantage of the anonymity of the internet. This is why Reddit is a bit of haven, at least for me, because to have a serious discussion on the internet is almost impossible.

If it makes you feel any better I'd say about 60% of the ignorance stems from the commentators being under 15. This is of course pulled out of my ass, but I support it in my head by remembering that I was just like that back then, and that the alternative makes my head hurt.

This is exactly what a large portion of "conservative" posters in r/politics are. You see the exact same wording of arguments down to identical sentences. I think some of the really long conservitard circlejerks are really just one guy with like 20 accounts.

The only people I know that still use yahoo and its services are non-tech savvy and older. So it could be that they're just parroting bullshit they hear on Fox News as truth. Really though, almost any site with that kind of traffic is going to have all sorts of brain-hurting drivel in the comments section. Everyone has an opinion on everything, even if they don't know anything about it.

It can be worse in a different way too. In the small town where I used to live, the folks who argued in the comment section also argued in person. So you could tell they hated each other and were carrying arguments back and forth between mediums. Shit like "Yeah well, Jim, your opinion on this new traffic light is bullshit because your daughter is a teenage mother."

My entire life (nearly 50 years) conservatives have dominated letters-to-the-editor pages in newspapers, and now in the internet era they dominate most comment sections as well. They even dominated radio call-in shows long before the right had taken over AM radio (I remember when Larry King had a radio show). The amount of noise they make has always been far greater than their actual numbers. I've never quite figured it out in all these years, though I suspect it's because ignorant people just tend to shout more.

Most of your “local” papers were bought off by a media conglomerate a decade-plus ago. McClatchy is a contender, I’d guess.

What he does is buy a paper, fire the local reporters, leaving a skeleton crew to copy/paste wire stories and give a patina of serving their community (enough for the sales team to justify their ads for). Slims down the news hole to a fraction of what it was. More Feel Good pieces and LOTS of syndicated writers (cheaper, but obviously cookie-cutter) Outsourcing most the editorial function to that wonderful bastion of investigative journalism, North Carolina.

The reason it happened so effectively and recently (compared to how long your local paper was probably in business) was that the anti-trust regulations were gutted as part of the Telecommunications Act (the same that allowed local TV stations to have the same thing happening to them). That is, it was allowed to happen, by government action, largely for corporate goals (and cynically, I’d think to reduce the number of independent voices informing the American public).

Business model shifts (the internet) had a big impact, too. But this was a double whammy for independent publishers at the worst time. And it’s anti-democratic.

So, yeah. For the most part, there is no more “local” news. Simply [your town here] stamped on the editorial driven by some guy in Charlotte.

Almost every comment is just willfully ignorant parroting of what they heard on Faux News the night before... They use the "Real" unemployment number only when speaking of Obama's presidency and then revert to the more widely accepted, and mostly quoted number when referring to GW's tenure.

I was just about to say. Are these people high school dropouts or something? Somebody will say "Wow, this is good news. Things are improving." The inevitable response will be along the lines of "_____ your obviously just ignorant. you obammy drones just want to suck the teet of hard working Americans. get a job you leach looser!!!!!" You can't talk to these people. They have no facts or arguments, just schoolyard insults.

I read the first few comments, and while I don't think they were particularly enlightening, they were not particularly trashy... but perhaps there were some opinions you didn't agree with?

But the real point here is that there is more to this statistic than meets the eye. Get over to r/economics and see what they are saying about it (but get ready for some heartache). Just because it seems like good news, doesn't automatically mean it is true, or accurate or representative of reality... just do some more research on it if you really want to get to the truth.

I read Yahoo news because I have a older mobile phone and it's the only news page I get on it. Any article, whether politically motivated or not, has comments buried in it saying some of the most inane and racist dribble I've ever seen. Just go to a Yahoo Science article and peruse the comments.

Just more lies from this president and his helper government slaves. Everybody knows it is about 15% and 20% for blacks. More flip-flops, Lies , Bait-n-Switch, and Renigueing on promises! Whine, Whine, Blame, Distract, Change position, Whine, Blame, Let Down, Blame. Vote Failure Out CITIZENS! One Vote One CITIZEN. Watch out for ACORN, SOROS, & AFLCIO. Turn In your Own voting card. Don't Let Them change it!

People not in the labor force: senior citizens, people under 16 years of age, workers employed P/T for economic reasons, marginally attached workers (stopped looking for child care reasons, etc), and discouraged workers (people who leave the work force because they could not find a job).

Make sense??

edit: TL;DR - Because lots of people got part time jobs, unless all of them are still looking for full time employment, they drop out of the unemployed number, but stay in the labor force. This causes the unemployment number to drop. the number of jobs added you see touted is usually the FULL TIME jobs, unless otherwise stated.

Economics....it's what's for dinner.

EDIT 2:
They use two different surveys, and different numbers from these surveys to give the numbers that the MSM and most people report on.

Both numbers are subject to much statistical noise. It's hard to measure the economy.

The household survey has lagged behind the establishment survey ('jobs added') for the last few months and the establishment numbers from previous months have been adjusted upwards. In part, this probably represents the household survey catching up to reality.

They do two surveys:
1. Institutional - they ask companies how many jobs they added in the month. Some fancy statistics and hey presto, 114,000.
2. Household - they phone up households and ask people whether they're employed or not. Some fancy statistics and hey presto again, 873,000 people said they got jobs this month. This is where the 7.8% statistic comes from, the institutional survey has nothing to do with it.

As an aside, Terrific_Tyler's points on the part-time workers is important as it means that this gain might be temporary. What was encouraging is that the participation rate (the number of people with jobs or actively looking, as a percent of the eligible population) ticked UP this month, so the gain wasn't due to people just giving up on finding work, as past falls in the unemployment rate were.

This is the answer to OP's question. TerrificTyler has some nice facts about unemployment, but does not answer the question. The actual answer, as overthinkingguy said, is they are two different surveys!

Recap -- for [2.5] years empt has been growing. The ups & downs of the empt report are more sampling error than starts & stops in job growth. -- Betsey Stevenson, Professor of Econ. at University of Michigan.

This is because of the revised job numbers from previous months, 418,000 jobs which were discounted previously were added back to the total numbers. labor force participation rate was steady at 63.6 percent.

Keep in mind that the population is expanding, so just getting back to the starting point four years ago means that we are still far behind. Realistically, the overall employment situation is as bad as it has ever been since before WWII. The numbers look better than they should because the long term "discouraged workers" are not counted in these rates.

oh yeah, by no means are we totally there yet. but compared to four years ago? or to europe or the rest of the world? we're looking pretty good. with the discouraged workers, the number is around 13%. the discouraged worker segment is largely comprised of the older (late 50's, early 60's) people who lost their jobs in the 2008 crash. it sucks that they will never get decent jobs again.

so yeah, we're just getting back to the starting point from four years ago. and considering that the entire world is experiencing financial difficulties the last four years, that's pretty good. looking ahead, there's the holiday season, which will boost employment with temporary jobs, which will boost spending due to people having jobs, which will boost consumer confidence. if nothing crazy in the world happens, the economy will get out of the rut this next year.

I thought 418K was how much the total labor force increased, and revising previous months only added 87K more jobs.

"In September, the number of people who said they found work soared 873,000 and the size of the work force also increased. That brought the number of unemployed down to 12.1 million, the fewest since January 2009."

That's what the big drop is based on. Almost 900K people said they got jobs last month.

Fox stopped allowing comments on their articles shortly after they realized it was turning into a lynch mob every article. Helped their credibility if you ask me, they have since spread out to other blogs/"news" sites now.

people say it is just fox news comments but that is not true, it is basically any news comment section on the internet. USA Today, WSJ, CNN, local news, I mean do they just send right wing commenters out there to leave these comments or are these ignorant people really everywhere? Also, for every 10 right wing comments I see only about one left wing comment., what up with that? Does the right wing just have bigger mouths?

What I have learned is that, for the most part, when a liberal has something to say they research the fact first. If confronted, those facts can be presented.

A conservative is more like a child with no filter. First thing that comes to their mind, no matter how wrong, is said. If confronted, they just tell you that you are a libtard drinking the Kool-Aid and you hate America.

Its less about right wing or left wing. Its that ignorant people have bigger mouths. The ignorant people just are the target demographic for Republican media now like they used to be for Democrats back when Kansas was known for being "progressive" and not the Westboro Baptists.

Y! News comments have been that vile for years. I would know, seeing as I, shamefully, was reading them every day since around the '08 campaign. I supplemented it with Politico, until I just switched to Daily Kos in 2010, and reddit early this year (this is a newer account).

Is any part of that drop in labor participation the fact that the baby boomers have started dropping out of the workforce, at a rate that I believe is 10,000 a day (Or rather 10,000 baby boomers a day are at retirement age)? I always hear "Folks, people working is dropping" and go "Wait, what about the baby boomers retiring?"

I've been following yahoo comments for a while, i can tell you that any story which may even HINT that Obama is linked to something positive, it gets FILLED with troll comments and fake upvotes. Rove and all the others who buy all these front groups- it wouldn't surprise me AT ALL if they hired 500 chinese people or whatever to post and upvote on Yahoo all day to sway public opinion (or attempt to.)

It's worth questioning, though, what exactly are these jobs that are being created? It's not quite so good if you've got 200,000 new part-time jobs at McDonald's, for example.

Essentially, these need to be jobs that 1) people can get in the first place (i.e., it's also going to be unhelpful to create 200,000 new high-level research jobs), but, also, 2) people can support a family on.

Do you know where I can find a legit source for that? My conservative friend tweeted this exactly: "Ever heard of seasonal jobs?" and I want to PROVE HER WRONG! Just kidding, but really I want to encourage a nice debate with her.

I don't know as much about this as the person you are asking, I just saw your request and tried to find info on it, partially because I was curious.

From what I understood, they don't specifically exclude seasonal jobs, they adjust according to what the normal job fluctuation is for that season. So, I guess seasonal fluctuations weren't taken into account for some numbers.

What you'd really want to watch out for, I suppose, is if the government did seasonally adjust for the previous couple months when you would expect (or at least I would expect) seasonal unemployment rates to go up (summer jobs end, winter seasonal haven't started) and then failed to use the adjustment this time.

No, unemployment is measured several different ways, all of them are reported in the jobs report. For the one that is discussed the most, U3, you are not counted, but there are other mesures that include the under employed. For the most inclusive number you can look at U6.

The number that many people will try to bring up is the labor force participation rate. That number is shrinking, fewer people are working. people will tell you that speaks to the unemployment situation. I disagree. Given that the unemployment numbers don't really show that, it seems more likely to me that people who delayed retirement after their pensions tanked are leaving the work force now that the stock market is doing better, combined with people who would be retiring now anyway I think this explains the unusual drop. Remember, we have a flood of boomers who are starting to retire, if someone is siting a raw number without accounting for things like this then I don't hold their opinion in very much regard.

I'd be curious to see what percentage of those who stopped looking for work are, in fact, at or near retirement age and feel financially secure enough to leave the workforce or switch to part-time work.

In Australia about a decade or so ago, with the change of government the unemployment rate almost halved in their first year. This was largely attributed to them changing who qualified for the statistic and not anything relating to them actually obtaining employment (people that worked a few hours a week stopped being counted). This of course was largely ignored by the media who praised them for their wonderous management of the country.

While employers added only a modest 114,000 jobs last month, the jobless rate declined from 8.1 percent in August. The unemployment rate fell because more people were working, not because discouraged job seekers stopped looking, the numbers showed.

Headline unemployment (the 7.8% figure) includes only workers in the labor force (16 years or older, non-institutionalized, actively looking for work). However, this does NOT include discouraged workers, or workers who normally would be part of the labor force but have given up on finding a job.

Everyone in politics knows the economy will probably come roaring back in the next 5 years and both sides want to be the one in power when it does...setting the sitting party up for a few decades of power.

Correct. Discouraged and underemployed workers are included in the broader U6 unemployment rate which remained flat this month.
Remus117 makes a solid point which is that - contrary to what Romney might say - people have not been 'fleeing the workforce' (which would bring down unemployment %).

Unemployment at 44 month low, corporate profits and stock market through the roof. War in Iraq over. Healthcare for all. All while butthurt repuplicans sit in the corner with their arms folded and pout.
Congrats on 4 more years, Obama.

How is wealth distribution doing? How about U6 unemployment? Manufacturing productivity is up, unemployment is down because people are taking part time jobs to make ends meet, and over the last 4 years, 93% of wage growth has gone to the top 3% income levels. "main street not Wallstreet". My ass. One thing is right, nominal stock market prices are through the roof, but in terms of gold both the DOW and the SAnd P are down to early 1990s levels.

Didn't Obama actually want to keep troops in Iraq, but was unable to? Aren't we still in the longest streak of unemployment in our nation's history? Forcing everyone to buy healthcare is "healthcare for all?

Granted, the GOP plan would get that number much lower. When you take away employee benefits, and the minimum wage laws. How can a business afford not to hire more slaves employees. The best part is "I like to fire people" Romney & Co can just fire the sick workers (don't call off now!), and replace them!